Re: Searching accented words

From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)atentus(dot)com>
To: João Paulo Batistella <batistellabr(at)yahoo(dot)com(dot)br>
Cc: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Searching accented words
Date: 2002-08-04 04:55:15
Message-ID: Pine.LNX.4.44.0208040052000.29827-100000@cm-lcon1-46-187.cm.vtr.net
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João Paulo Batistella dijo:

> Hi!
>
> I have, in the same column, accented words and not.
> But I don´t want to worry about it.
>
> Imagine the table Person:
> CREATE TABLE PERSON (name TEXT)
>
> INSERT INTO PERSON VALUES ('José')
> INSERT INTO PERSON VALUES ('Jose')
>
> The following statement
> SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE NAME like 'José'
> would return only the first row, because 'José' is an
> accented word.

I think you have two ways of solving this:

1. using regular expressions with character classes where an accented
letter is found:
SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE name ~* '^Jos[eé]$'
(note the anchoring to make it equivalent to the absence of % in
LIKE)

2. using a function to convert the accented letters in strings. Then
use it like
SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE drop_accents(name) LIKE
drop_accents('José')

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]atentus.com>)
"El hombre nunca sabe de lo que es capaz hasta que lo intenta" (C. Dickens)

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